Michael Reagan Jr. died on January 13, 2020, after a ten-day detention at the Okmulgee County Criminal Justice Authority in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Reagan had a documented seizure disorder and had been prescribed gabapentin. Over his final days, he experienced repeated seizures, reported that he couldn't see, told staff he had not slept since arrival, and explicitly asked to go to a hospital. Nurses assessed him, administered medications, and returned him to his cell without calling a physician or EMS. In the early morning hours of January 13, after officers found Reagan unresponsive on his cell floor with blood under his head, the sole on-duty nurse left the facility to deliver paperwork to another detention center. An intercom call reporting another seizure and vomiting of blood followed. An ambulance arrived at 4:00 a.m. Reagan was pronounced dead at 5:11 a.m.
Taylor Burke, as personal representative of Reagan's estate, sued Dr. Adel Malati — OCCJA's medical director — under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging deliberate indifference to serious medical needs. The claim was supervisory in nature: Burke argued that Malati, who was physically present at the jail roughly once a week, never provided nurses with concrete escalation guidance for seizure emergencies, failed to implement policies directing nurses to contact a physician or call EMS when inmates with seizure disorders deteriorated, and left licensed practical nurses effectively unsupervised in making critical medical decisions.
Magistrate Judge Jason A. Robertson, exercising full jurisdiction by consent of the parties, held that Burke had adduced enough evidence to survive summary judgment on the constitutional-violation question. The opinion concluded that a reasonable jury could find that nurses Kilo and Bauer subjectively appreciated a substantial risk of serious harm to Reagan yet failed to respond reasonably, satisfying the underlying violation required for supervisory liability. On the supervisory side, the court held that triable issues existed on all three affirmative-link elements — personal involvement, causation, and deliberate indifference — noting that Malati's contractual responsibility for training and policy implementation, combined with his admittedly limited on-site presence and the absence of any specific escalation training, was sufficient to create jury questions.
The case turned on qualified immunity. Burke relied primarily on Burke v. Regalado, 935 F.3d 960 (10th Cir. 2019), Prince v. Sheriff of Carter County, 28 F.4th 1033 (10th Cir. 2022), Crowson v. Washington County, Utah, 983 F.3d 1166 (10th Cir. 2020), and Estate of Jensen by Jensen v. Clyde, 989 F.3d 848 (10th Cir. 2021). The court distinguished each. Burke v. Regalado involved a sheriff repeatedly alerted through audits and reports to years-long systemic failures; Prince involved a sheriff with actual knowledge of numerous documented systemic problems. Crowson, the court noted, confirmed that the law was not clearly established as to an infrequently on-site jail physician's clinical decisions in materially similar circumstances. Estate of Jensen addressed frontline gatekeeper nurses who personally observed serious deterioration and did nothing, while the Tenth Circuit declined to impose liability on the part-time physician based solely on higher-level policy or training theories in that posture.
Because none of those decisions rendered Malati's alleged conduct beyond debate — given that he was never contacted about Reagan's condition, never personally examined him, and had no documented notice of recurring emergency-response failures at OCCJA — the court held that Burke had not met his burden on the clearly-established-law prong. Malati's motion for summary judgment was granted, and both the pretrial conference set for April 23, 2026 and the trial set for May 4, 2026 were stricken.